It is customary to place on tables in restaurants and banquet halls a variety of packaged condiments, breadsticks, crackers, appetizers, and like products to be consumed before, during, and after a meal. These consumable products are complements to the main meal and ostensibly function to whet the appetite of a restaurant or banquet hall patron. Thus, they are not to detract from the appetite.
But detract often they do: if not by filling up a patron so that when the main meal arrives he or she is less desirous of it, then by detracting from the visual aspect of appetite with such clutter on the banquet table as discarded wrappers, usually cellophane or the like, that had packaged the products complementing the meal. Patrons appear to be sensitive to the clutter as they attempt to tidy up the table by crumbling the paper in a dish or ashtray. Such expediencies are usually not successful, however, as the dishes only serve to locate the refuse but not to contain its resilient expansion from its condensed crumpled condition. Additionally, ashtrays produce risks of fires. In either case, a dish or ashtray provides an additional article to clean for the next table setting, and with the uncontained refuse in the dish or ashtray, which is apt to spill out of it, there will most probably be a need to clean around the dish, including the floor, the chairs, and, perhaps, the patron's lap.